Erdoğan to Obama: There’s no good terrorist

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Sunday urged President Barack Obama to join forces in the fight against terrorism without distinguishing between groups and individuals, who threaten world’s stability and safety of citizens.

“There is no good terrorist or bad terrorist; every kind of terrorism is bad,” Erdoğan said after the meeting with Obama on the sidelines of the G20 summit in China, according to a report by state-run Anadolu news agency.

Erdoğan emphasized that Turkey and the U.S. “should adopt a shared attitude against all terrorist organizations as NATO member countries.”

Turkey classifies Kurdish groups, such as PKK, that has been fighting government forces in southeast of the country for decades, a terrorist organization. ISIL is in the same category as are PKK’s affiliates in neighboring Syria and Iraq.

The U.S. has armed and trained Kurdish fighters in the two countries and relies on them to fight ISIL on the ground under cover of U.S. and other countries’ air strikes.

Ankara has repeatedly called on the U.S. to stop supporting Kurdish rebels in neighboring country because Ankara fears that they will carve out a territory just across the Turkish border and link it with PKK-controlled areas in their quest for autonomy.

The dispute deepened after Turkey launched a full-scale military operation into Syria following a deadly bombing of a Turkish wedding. The operation was billed as an assault on an ISIL base in a border town although Turkey-backed Syrian rebels, accompanied by Turkish tanks, simultaneously went after the U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters to push them away from the border area.

“We do not want the formation of a terror corridor on our southern [border],” Erdoğan said, and added: “I believe we will be successful in this fight.”